Live shipping rates for one parcel sent from a US origin — inside the US, or to Canada, the UK, Germany or Australia — across USPS, UPS and FedEx, and DHL Express on the German and Australian lanes. Describe the item in plain words and the packed box size and weight are estimated. Give exact dimensions and weight to skip the estimate. Returns up to five purchasable services with the checkout total, the carrier cost beneath it and the SMKlog fee stated separately.

Manual review: oversized, palletized or crated shipments are priced by a person. Clients that declare the io.modelcontextprotocol/tasks extension get a durable task handle (poll it with tasks/get, answers usually take a few business hours). Others get a pointer to the human review page. Shipping labels are bought on smklog.com, not through this tool.

Choosing between the tools: use this one to answer what a shipment would cost. Then hand the quote_id it returns to create_checkout_link once the human has settled on shipping this exact parcel, so the pair costs one carrier call rather than two. Use get_price_index instead for typical or historical prices: it is free, while this tool spends a rate-limited carrier call every time.

Parameter rules:

• weight_lb, length_in, width_in and height_in count only as a set of four, each above zero. Leave any one out and all four are ignored in favor of the estimate, so never send weight alone.

• Online pricing covers one parcel up to 150 lb, 108 in on the longest side and 165 in of length plus girth. A heavier or larger box, a quantity above 1, or a product worded as freight (pallet, LTL, truckload, machinery, bulk) returns no rates and goes to a person.

• product is the item itself, up to 200 characters. A bare route ("to Canada"), a bare weight ("7 lbs") or a question is refused as product_not_recognized before any carrier is called.

• from_zip must be a real 5-digit US ZIP (ZIP+4 is trimmed to five), or the call fails with invalid_us_zip.

• to_zip follows to_country: a 5-digit ZIP for US, otherwise that country's own postal code handed to the carriers as typed. A to_country outside US, CA, GB, DE and AU is refused as international_unsupported_online, so do not retry it with a different box.

• Allowance: 80 calls an hour per client, shared with the public /quote route.

Turns a decided shipment into a payment session for buying its shipping label: the checkout amount and a handoff URL that opens SMKlog checkout prefilled with the parcel. Use it after get_parcel_quote, passing the quote_id that call returned, so the price is reused and no second carrier call is spent. Without a quote_id it prices the shipment live from the fields. The result carries a session_id: keep it, and get_checkout_status tells you when the human has paid and when the label exists.

Side effects: it writes a session record (30-day life, readable through get_checkout_status) and is not idempotent. Calling it twice makes two sessions and, without a quote_id, spends two carrier calls. It never charges: no card is touched and nothing is reserved until the human confirms the contents certification and the carrier-adjustment consent on the page and pays there. A stale link simply reprices.

No session is returned when a person has to price the shipment: freight, oversize, a quantity above 1, or an installed lithium battery crossing a border. Quote first to learn which case applies.

Parameter rules:

• A valid quote_id overrides product, from_zip, to_zip, to_country and quantity. service is still honored.

• An expired quote_id falls back to live pricing from the fields. If those were omitted too, the call fails with missing_required_fields, so pass them alongside an old id.

• service is matched as a case-insensitive fragment of the display name ("Ground Advantage", "UPS Ground Saver"). A fragment that matches nothing silently anchors the cheapest rate, so read the service field in the result.

• from_zip is a real 5-digit US ZIP. to_zip follows to_country (US, CA, GB, DE or AU).

• On the four international lanes the human completes the customs declaration on the page, and duty is billed to the recipient on arrival.

Track a shipment whose shipping label was bought on smklog.com, by carrier tracking number. Returns the current delivery status, the latest scan events and the estimated delivery date when the carrier reports one. Works for SMKlog labels only — it is not a universal tracker for arbitrary USPS, UPS, FedEx or DHL numbers, so a number from any other seller comes back not-found rather than as a status. Unrelated to the two pricing tools: it neither quotes nor spends quote allowance. Parameter rules: tracking_number is the only key; no order id or email is needed or accepted. When the label was bought through a create_checkout_link session, get_checkout_status hands back this number at label_ready. It is matched after removing spaces and hyphens and ignoring case, so a pasted or spoken number works as-is. Expect USPS as 20 to 22 digits (13 characters ending in US for international), UPS as 1Z plus 16 characters, FedEx as 12 to 22 digits; anything shorter than 6 characters after cleanup is refused as tracking_number_required, and a number SMKlog never sold answers 404 tracking_not_found with status "not_found". Scan events come newest first, up to eight.

The SMKlog parcel shipping price index: a monthly repriced basket of six common boxes (1 to 20 lb) shipped from Newark, NJ to five US cities, quoted through the same live USPS, UPS and FedEx pipeline that prices real shipments. Returns the cheapest purchasable service per box and lane with every rate behind it, plus basket averages. Reference data for questions like "what does shipping a shoebox cost in the US right now" — reading it spends no quote allowance. For a price on a specific shipment, call get_parcel_quote instead. Parameter rules: month names one published issue as YYYY-MM; issues exist from 2026-07 onward, one per month, and omitting month returns the newest. A month with no issue answers issue_not_found together with available_months, so one miss lists every valid value; anything not shaped YYYY-MM answers invalid_month. Every issue prices the same boxes and lanes, so two months compare cell for cell.

Reports where a payment session made by create_checkout_link stands: whether the human has opened checkout, paid, and whether the shipping label exists yet, with the tracking number once it does. Reads SMKlog's own order records only: no carrier call, no quote allowance, nothing changes. Poll it after handing the human the link, minutes apart rather than seconds, because nothing moves until the human acts.

Statuses, in order: awaiting_checkout (link made, no checkout started), checkout_started (a checkout exists, not paid), paid (paid, label not created yet: the checkout page buys it right after payment, otherwise an operator picks it up), label_ready (label bought, tracking_number present), delivered, refunded. Once label_ready, feed tracking_number to track_parcel for scan events.

Parameter rules:

• session_id is the session_id returned by create_checkout_link, shaped as_ plus a UUID. Nothing else identifies a session: no order id, no email, no quote_id.

• A session lives 30 days from creation. An unknown, malformed or expired id answers session_not_found rather than a status.

• The answer never carries names, addresses or emails. Treat the session_id like a tracking number: whoever holds it can read the tracking number.

• A manual-review request made from the handoff page is not a checkout and leaves the status at awaiting_checkout.

• Allowance: 60 checks an hour per client.